


(Not) The Worst Case Scenario

by JacarandaBanyan



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Camping, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Light Angst, M/M, Prompt Fic, Shifter AU, Stony Bingo, golden retriever Steve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-20 15:24:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18527818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: Steve and Tony have been happily dating for a while now, but Tony has yet to shift in front of Steve, and it's becoming a Thing.





	(Not) The Worst Case Scenario

**Author's Note:**

> For Stony Bingo N3- Worst Case Scenario
> 
> I've seen Shifter AUs before that deal with 'cats and dogs' and other traditionally incompatible animals, and I wanted to try putting together two much more incompatible animals instead.

“So, since you’re dating the man,” Clint asked one day over a post-mission breakfast of nutrition bars and ibuprofen, “What’s Tony’s shifted form?”

Steve kept his eyes on the little bottle of pills as he counted out one dose for Clint and one for Natasha so they wouldn’t be able to see his embarrassment. 

“I don’t know. We haven’t shifted together yet.”

“Really?” Natasha asked. “It’s been what, two weeks now?”

“Closer to three. But I don’t want to pressure him.” He didn’t want to be having this conversation, especially not in rural Azerbaijan in the aftermath of a taxing mission, and definitely not with the two nosiest people on SHIELD’s payroll. 

“Steve, man, it’s not like you’re pressuring him to have sex with you or anything. This is like saying ‘yeah, we’re dating and all, but we don’t hold hands.’”

Steve bit the inside of his lip, where it was less obvious that he was doing it. It  _ was _ a little strange, but for Tony he was willing to let it lie. The world trampled all over Tony’s boundaries constantly. The last thing he wanted to do was make him feel like his comfort didn’t matter. 

“Steve,” Natasha asked, “Are you sure this is as serious for Tony as it is for you?”

“Of course!” Tony may have dated casually a lot during his life, but he had assured Steve that he was serious about this. 

“If you’re sure.” She sounded unconvinced. 

“Better hope he’s not a cat,” Clint chimed in. “Wouldn’t that suck? I mean, you take golden retriever friendliness to a new level, Cap, but even that’s not always enough for cats. There’s this cat that lives out of the dumpsters outside my apartment, and let me tell you, I offered that cat pizza every day for a month! But that ungrateful little feller  _ still _ hisses whenever he sees Lucky, and when I fell in the dumpster last week he took a swipe at me, even though I only fell on him a  _ little  _ bit.”

“It’s hard to see you in the field, Clint, and reconcile that competent man with the disaster human being who lives your personal life,” Natasha said. “Cats don’t like pizza, and no animal likes a full-grown human adult falling on them.”

“Dog shifters have healthy, long lasting relationships with cat shifters all the time,” Steve said tightly. 

“If by  _ all the time _ you mean about five percent of the time,” Natasha shrugged lightly. Steve glared at her. 

“I like cats.”

“I’m not saying you don’t.” She offered him a nutrition bar. “Just that maybe you and him should have a talk when we get back to New York.”

He took the bar and ate it sullenly. In his mind, Tony grew cat ears and looked up at him with big, warm cat’s eyes.

* * *

When they get back to New York, Tony is waiting for them on the landing strip with a cooler full of drinks, several lumpy bags, and one of the super-reinforced leashes he’d made for Steve after it became clear that his post-Serum strength was too much for normal ones.

“I’m dragging you on a outdoors trip!” Tony called out as they stepped off the plane, brandishing the leash as though  _ he  _ was the one who had to drag  _ Steve _ to the wilderness instead of the other way around. “If you were planning to sleep, save it for the cabin. You’ve left me alone for days, what kind of boyfriend does that?” 

“A terrible one,” Steve smiled. “I promise I’ll make it up to you. How long will we be gone?”

He wrapped an arm around his boyfriend’s waist and pulled him up against his chest so he could kiss him. His goatee scratched pleasantly against his cheek. 

“Just a few days. I’ve gotta be back by Monday, there’s a big conference I’m supposed to present at.”

He pulled away from Steve and gestured towards the car. 

“I already packed some clothes and toiletries for you, so if you’ll just get in on the other side we can be on our way to the uncivilized wastes you love so much.”

Steve shifted in the car, and once they were out of the city Tony rolled the windows down so he could stick his head out. His ears flapped wildly behind him in the wind, and Tony laughed at them the entire way there. 

* * *

At the cabin he and Tony hiked, fished, and played several rousing games of retrieve-the-robot-duck. Steve moved from human to dog form and back fluidly, holding hands with Tony one moment and getting pets from him the next. It was great.

Tony didn’t shift. 

He didn’t want to push. He really didn’t. But it was starting to break his heart. People shifted with their friends, their family, or just because they felt like it. Tony not shifting without so much as an explanation felt like a stinging rejection. 

The first time he tried to bring it up, Tony ran clever fingers through his scalp right along the part of his skull where his ears would have flopped had he been shifted. After so long away, unable to shift freely and without his boyfriend to cuddle with at night, that simple touch blasted through his defenses. He moaned lightly and leaned into the touch. Before he knew it, he was halfway shifted and nuzzling his whole head against Tony’s palm. 

It was hard to tell himself that he had failed at anything when the end result was Tony sitting with him long into the night, petting and scratching him until he was a puddle of golden retriever goo. He resolved to try again tomorrow. 

* * *

The second time he tried to bring it up, Tony stuffed a piece of chocolate in his mouth before he could get the first whole thing out.

“Eat up, Steve! It’s not every day we get the chance to make our own s’mores without breaking the city fire code or something.”

He bit into the chocolate and moved the two halves to separate sides of his mouth so it was no longer holding down his tongue and preventing him from speaking. 

“It’s not a s’more if you just eat the chocolate, Tony. That’s how you run out of ingredients prematurely.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Tony chuckled. He broke off another piece from the half-gone bar in his hand and popped it into his mouth. “There’s enough chocolate in the cabin to for us to each eat our body weight every day for a week.”

“Is it even safe to eat chocolate while shifted?” Steve asked. “Back in the twenties, before chocolate got so expensive no one bought it, there were all these public announcements about how you needed to change back to eat human food, or you ran the risk of hurting yourself.”

“It’s only dangerous if you don’t manage to turn back before you finish digesting it,” Tony said. He plucked a fresh marshmallow from the bag on the chair next to him and pierced it with a thin, roughly meter-long stuck he’d found a few hours ago when there was still enough daylight to look around. Then he stuck it back into the fire pit so that it hovered over a patch of shimmering, glowing coals. 

“I don’t know about you, Tony, but I know I won’t be able to hold the stick or open the ingredients if I shift.”

Tony didn’t rise to the obvious invitation. 

“Don’t worry about it, I’ll do it for you. Ever tried to see how much chocolate you could eat as a dog before you started to feel sick?”

“Nope. There was never enough to waste like that.” He pulled his own stick from where it had been resting on the rim of the fire pit. The marshmallow on the end was a golden, pancake-brown and puffed up like it had been stung by wasps. It had expanded unevenly, giving the impression that it hadn’t been fully a solid until he’d pulled it away from the flames. 

Tony waved a piece of chocolate at him. “Wanna try it and see?”

Steve couldn’t resist that face. He began to shift, and let go of any hopes of seeing Tony’s shifted form tonight. 

* * *

The next time he tried to bring it up, Tony distracted him with science.

“Hey Tony,” he asked the next morning as he prepared a simple breakfast and tried to figure out how to work Tony’s custom portable coffee maker. “Yesterday was fun, but how do you feel about something a little more vigorous? There’s loads of forest around here, I bet it would be fun to explore. Lots of good smells.”

Whatever Tony’s shifted form was, it had to have a sense of smell, right? The switch from predominantly relying on sight to relying on smell was such a near-universal experience, it was hard to imagine it not being the case. As far as he could remember, only eagles and some other predatory birds kept their strong sight after shifting. He didn’t think Tony was a bird of prey, though. Sam and Clint had had enough friendly flying contests by now that Tony would have joined them if at all possible. Sometimes it was all they could do to keep him from gluing wings on the Iron Man suit and competing in that.

What was Tony afraid of? It was like he thought his shifted form was some sort of worst case scenario compatibility-wise.

“Mmm, maybe not the woods, but I’ve been working on something that should be just as exciting for you as sniffing every tree like it’s a new perfume line with your favorite celebrity’s face on it.”

_ Exciting for you. _ Like the whole idea of shifting was something for Steve and Steve only. 

“Tony,” he started again, only to be interrupted by a mechanical  _ quack. _

“I hope you’re feeling up to being my test dummy,” Tony smiled. He held up what appeared to be a robot duck for Steve’s inspection. “This little guy can swim much faster than a normal duck, and stay underwater for longer, among other things. It’s got random and targeted movement patterns, so tracking it through the reeds should be an actual challenge. What do you say?”

Steve looked at Tony’s happy, expectant face, then down at the ridiculous robot duck, then back at Tony. He could keep pushing. Ask directly, so Tony wouldn’t be able to wriggle out of it. Tony was deflecting and they both knew it, and the best way to pierce Tony’s misdirections and distractions was to be direct and blunt. All he had to do was come right out and ask. 

But that was just what he didn’t want to do. It didn’t make rational sense, but forcing the issue felt like giving up. Couples were supposed to shift around each other as a matter of course. If he had to ask, it was because something was wrong with their relationship, and he desperately wanted that to not be true. 

“Alright. But this seems like it will be a lot more fun for me than you.”

Tony waved away his concern. 

“Trust me, I’ll have plenty of fun watching you try to swim and wag your tail at the same time.”

* * *

It wasn’t until day four of their little trip, while they were sitting around the remains of last night’s campfire finishing up breakfast, that Steve finally came right out and asked.

“Tony, is there a reason why you won’t shift around me?”

Tony, who had been relaxed and cheerful up until that moment, went tense. 

“Is that something you want to do?” He asked slowly. 

Wasn’t Tony supposed to be a genius? There was no way he hadn’t picked up on all of Steve’s hinting. Surely he knew that it was way past the time when they normally would have shifted together. Heck, if Tony had been normal about it, he would have shifted with the rest of the Avengers before he and Steve ever got together.

“Yes, it definitely is,” he said. 

“All right,” Tony said, still slow and unsure. Almost like he was trying to give himself more time to think of an escape plan. 

Steve had tried not to think about that possibility. He liked Tony, was halfway to loving him, but if Tony didn’t want to shift around him, how could he interpret that besides a complete lack of reciprocation? He knew Tony didn’t shift often, even with the other Avengers, and he’d never seen him make a shifted appearance on television, but he’d hoped that he was just private about it. Some people only shifted with close friends and family. Did Steve not count as close?

“Do you not want to shift around me, Tony?” He asked. It tore at him to ask, but there was no holding back the words. 

“Well, I wouldn’t want to compete with you,” Tony said with a wink, confidence leaking back into his voice. “You’re so majestic when you shift, you know that right? No one should look that amazing with their tongue lolling out the side of their face and drooling on the floor, but somehow you manage it.”

So they were doing deflections, then. 

“You don’t have to compete. There’s no one here but us. Unless you don’t want to.”

“Oh no, no, I definitely want to,” Tony said hurriedly. “How do you feel about water?”

“Great! I love water,” Steve said. Then, before Tony could make some grand plans for  _ some other time _ , he leaped up and started towards the dock that jutted out into the lake behind the cabin. 

“Come on, let’s go.”

“Wait wait wait, go? Do you mean  _ now? _ Steve-”

Steve took off running. His legs pumped and his muscles sparked with suddenly released energy. The ground reverberated under his footfalls like a quickening heartbeat, bringing him ever closer to the plunge. His feet felt like they could spontaneously turn into paws at any moment. It took all that remained of his control to stay firmly human-shaped until he reached the water. 

Tony called after him belatedly, but his words were lost to the excitement-hot blood pounding in his ears and the wind of his own forward motion. 

He shed his clothes as he ran, leaving them strewn behind him like small bits of garbage blown down the road by a strong wind. He stumbled a little getting his socks off and almost overbalanced and faceplanted into the grass, but he managed to catch himself at the last minute and keep running. 

The dock rattled and buckled under him as he passed over it, like he had brought down an earthquake with the force of his steps. It slowed him down a little, but not by much, and when he put a little more force into his back leg and leaped into the open air where the dock ended he was still traveling at almost top speed. 

He hung in space for what felt like a whole heartbeat, halfway between man and animal. Fierce joy crackled through each and every shifting, twisting muscle. Not even the shocking crash of the water on his skin could douse it. 

Water exploded outwards around him like he was a comet slamming into the earth. Bubbles twisted and rose like smoke around his paws, and a wave of water sloshed over his head, briefly managing to submerge him from nose to tail tip. Then he bobbed back up and shook his head, slapping his ears against the surface and sending water flying. 

When he turned himself around to face the dock again, Tony was standing there watching him. He barked excitedly, and tried to wag his tail. It was difficult with the water turning his fur into nothing but a heavy, sopping curtain that weighed down the muscles in his tail, but he managed to make Tony smile tentatively back, so he counted it as a win. 

He paddled back over to the dock and looked up at Tony meaningfully. Well, he was a golden retriever right now, so it probably came out more pleading and please-get-in-with-me-I’ll-be-sad-if-you-don’t than anything, but his boyfriend was a smart man. He’d know what Steve meant. 

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Give me a second to get my clothes off.”

Steve huffed, but conceded that Tony might want to do that. It would be difficult to retrieve them from the muddy bottom after all. He could wait a few minutes.

Except it wasn’t just a few minutes. Tony took forever just to take his shirt off! He had to undo each and every button, when he could easily have slid if off after the first two or three. Then, once it was off, he had to  _ unroll _ the sleeves and then  _ fold _ it. If Steve had had to guess, he wouldn’t have thought Tony was the type to fold his clothes. 

He whined and started swimming in tight little circles. His nose almost touched his tail when he swam like this, and the motion burned off a little of his excess nervous energy. It also meant that he wasn’t just staring up at Tony the whole time he got undressed, but also wasn’t swimming in any particular direction. Nothing could have distracted him from Tony’s presence, not even Fury throwing Loki’s Scepter and yelling ‘fetch.’ 

Soon. Soon, he would get to see Tony’s shifted form.

The pants should have been even easier than the shirt, but somehow Tony dragged those out too! It was almost like he was doing it on purpose. 

Wait.  _ Was _ Tony doing it on purpose?

He paused his circle swimming to get a proper look at the pile of clothing on the dock, which was growing at about the rate of an actual mountain. Now that he was looking at it, he realized that while the shirt was folded, it wasn’t folded  _ well. _ It looked like a child’s first attempt. And, for no reason that he could tell, Tony had buttoned up all the buttons all over again before folding it. 

Was Tony stalling?

The glow of happiness in his chest abruptly went out. Why would Tony be stalling? Was he self-conscious? Did he not want Steve to see his shifted form? Did he not want to play with Steve? Was he one of those people who got nervous around dogs? Did he feel pressured to show this side of himself to Steve even though he wasn’t ready? One horrified chased the next around his head. A pitiful whine broke loose from his throat. 

Tony’s face jerked up at the sound. He looked pained, like Steve’s little whimper had actually hurt him. 

“What is it, Steve? Are you okay?”

He couldn’t answer as he was, so he shut his eyes and let his back legs lengthen and sink as his body transformed. When he opened them again, he was treading water. He reached up and grabbed onto the dock with one hand and stopped kicking. 

“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, Tony,” he said. “I don’t want you to feel pressured-”

“It’s not that.” Tony interrupted. “I want to shift with you too.” He sounded just as miserable as Steve himself felt, and he wanted to pull himself up out of the water and wrap Tony up in a hug, or maybe shift again and nuzzle him until he was smiling and contented again. 

“Then why are you stalling like it’s a death sentence?” He asked instead. 

“I’m not- You know how important shifted forms are for people,” Tony said, like he was trying to circle the topic from a safe distance. “People want to be with their partner in both forms, and when that doesn’t work out, the relationship tends to sort of fizzle out. It’s not an exact science, of course, and no one’s ever  _ proved _ that your shifted form  _ needs _ to be compatible with your partner’s, but that’s the way it goes.”

“I like cats,” Steve blurts out, stupidly. Tony laughed one of those airy, sad laughs and shook his head. 

“I know you’d make the effort for me. Don’t think for a second that I’m doubting  _ you. _ But some animals just don’t go together.” He pulled off his socks and tossed them unceremoniously on top of his pile of poorly-folded clothes, then swung his bare feet of the end of the dock and dangled them in the water next to Steve. “It always becomes an issue somewhere down the line. I’ve had people tell me they could put up with whatever form I had, but I was always too different. Too incompatible. There’s not liking each other, or having mismatching body language, like cats and dogs and all those other standard forms. And then there’s me.”

Steve cocked his head, considering. While theoretically a person could shift into any animal that ‘reflected them’, the vast majority of people ended up as something familiar and easily connected to, like birds or dogs. He was pretty sure he’d heard once that there were no recorded cases of someone having a slug shift form, or a jellyfish, or some sort of extinct animal. Was Tony’s form something odd, then?

“So are planning on never changing around me?”

Tony looked away. 

“Well, not  _ never _ , but not right away or anything.”

“We’ve been dating for over a month, Tony.”

“I know! Believe me, I know. But it’s never the right time.” He sighed, and for a second he looked heartbreakingly sad, but too removed to comfort. Like an exquisitely rendered painting or anguish. “Every time you shift, it’s like all this pure physicality you’ve been holding back is finally freed. You smile and pant and run and let me pet you and scratch your ears and it’s  _ good. _ And I know you want my shifted form to be like that but better, and it’s just not going to be. And you’re going to act like it’s not a big deal, come up with a whole laundry list of things for us to do with only one of us shifted, but I’ll know. I’ll know that’s not what you wanted.”

Steve waited for him to finish his halting speech, even though all he wanted was to lunge out of the water and wrap his arms around his boyfriend until he’d hugged all the sadness away. 

Once the words had finally stopped, he reached up and rested one hand on Tony’s knee. 

“If you don’t want to shift for me, even if it’s for a dumb reason-”

“It’s not a  _ dumb reason, _ do you know what percentage of all couples who break up list incompatible shifted forms as a reason for doing so? There is so much data on this, Steve!”

_ “Even if it’s for a dumb reason,” _ he continued more forcefully, “you don’t have to. But I would like to see you.”  _ I’ve seen the way you look at me when I shift, how happy you are to run your fingers through my fur and talk to me while I sit by your side, and I want to feel that same shade of affection for you, _ he didn’t say. 

“Besides,” he shrugged, “you talk about some horrible future where only one of us is shifted at a time, but as things stand now we haven’t even made it that far yet.”

Tony smiled ruefully. “You got me there, Cap. Guess there’s nothing for it.”

He stood, and Steve pushed off of the dock and flipped onto his belly as he shifted back. Dogs couldn’t really swim on their backs, so it would be awkward to shift while laying like that. As he shifted, he heard a splash behind him. Little waves from the impact sloshed over his back, submerging everything but his head. By the time he got himself turned around back in the direction of the dock, Tony was underwater and out of sight. 

Then, a tentacle peeked out of the water like a periscope. It unfurled like a baby fern, then refurled. Like a jaunty wave. 

That must be Tony. 

Steve swam over to the tentacle, tail wagging and nose in overdrive. It was difficult to smell creatures in the water, but he couldn’t help himself. He wanted to fill his nose with Tony’s scent. 

An octopus hovered just below the surface, still surrounded by the last of the bubbles from jumping off the dock. Tony stayed patiently still while Steve swam around him, prodding him with his nose and barking, and remained that way when Steve grew frustrated with his dog form’s inability to properly communicate. No matter how he looked, barked, whined, and nosed, Tony’s octopus form showed no signs of recognition. Once his paws had been swapped out for hands, he carefully gathered the center of Tony’s mass in his palms and lifted him just far enough out of the water to see. Instantly a tentacle wrapped around his wrist. The suckers pulsed nicely against his skin, like a bunch of little kisses. 

Tony was squishy. It struck Steve as strange, that such a strong and unyielding man could have such a malleable, literally spineless shifted form. Then again, Tony could probably wreak havoc with those eight clever arms of his. Each and every one of them seemed to be constantly in motion, each sliding over the exposed skin of Steve’s arm and chest, suckers anchoring every time they came in contact with bare skin. 

He felt a smile spread and spread until his cheeks hurt. Tony was exploring him right back. 

“You’re beautiful, Tony,” he breathed. “So beautiful. And not incompatible at all.”

The exploring tentacles stilled. Octopus faces were hard to read, but Steve could sweat this one was looking at him in disbelief. 

“I know dogs and octopuses don’t typically go together,” he continued, stroking a slow, gentle hand over Tony’s head, “but all we need is a little strategy and we can totally work together. For instance, if I shift right now, you could ride on my back while I swim. Or hold on and hang out underwater, whichever is easiest for you. I can take you all the way around the pond, and you can tap the top of my head every time you want to stop and explore something.”

Tony didn’t say anything.

“It’ll be fun,” he said after an awkward pause. His smile felt a little more tight and overstretched than it had just moments before. 

Tony didn’t make a sound. Had Steve messed up somehow? Had he misread Tony’s actions? He’d never really held an octopus before. Had he messed up reading his body language? Then it hit him. He usually barked in agreement or whined in disagreement when he was shifted around Tony, but could an octopus even make audible noises? 

“Tap my chest once if you don’t want to do that, twice if you do want to.”

A long, red tentacle immediately reached out and batted at the center of his chest twice. 

“Alright then,” he smiled, “Let’s go exploring!”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [A Purfect Match](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20498003) by [justanotherpipedream](https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanotherpipedream/pseuds/justanotherpipedream)




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